Slow Internet. How do you troubleshoot?

[tom_newton]

If you want PDNS type service, but not to use NCSC (which is cloudflare in disguise, so SHOULD be good, but I suspect the "limit it to just people who are allowed it" causes more bother than it is worth) then use Quad 9s (I bet you can guess the IP)

[Gongalong]

In case anyone here knows, including Tom, when I enter a website name into the Chrome browser, is that resolved via the client's (Windows in this case) DNS or the Smoothwall appliance?

[robintech]

On 30/04/2026 at 11:25, BKGarry said:

Ah OK, so it is the pages are slow to respond, such no traffic but it can take a while for it to start going through. Like a slow start them boom?

 

 

Getting a similar issue ,  hard to tell what is causing it but you can feel it when browsing

Wondering if its the Smoothwall internal DNS we have enabled "To achieve a faster service, set the resolver to System internal DNS server and configure forwarders and conditional forwarders below. Forwarders and conditional forwarders will only be used for local queries if the resolver is set to System internal DNS server."

Don't want to reboot it yet

[Gongalong]

Ours is set to "System internal DNS server", with the protective DNS servers in forwarders.

[BKGarry]

16 hours ago, robintech said:

 

 

Getting a similar issue ,  hard to tell what is causing it but you can feel it when browsing

Wondering if its the Smoothwall internal DNS we have enabled "To achieve a faster service, set the resolver to System internal DNS server and configure forwarders and conditional forwarders below. Forwarders and conditional forwarders will only be used for local queries if the resolver is set to System internal DNS server."

Don't want to reboot it yet

 

Just to clarify, when I had this, it was before I had smoothwall implemented here, the only variable I changed was my Windows DNS Servers forwarding requests from PDNS to Google ones and after a day or so (assuming that it was stale caches on machines etc) it dramatically improved.

 

 

[robintech]

11 minutes ago, BKGarry said:

 

Just to clarify, when I had this, it was before I had smoothwall implemented here, the only variable I changed was my Windows DNS Servers forwarding requests from PDNS to Google ones and after a day or so (assuming that it was stale caches on machines etc) it dramatically improved.

 

 

 

We have it set to google for DNS Forwarders and conditional for our local domain wondering if its more browser issue than DNS as seems to be better today with no config changes.  Running a script to do 50 random domain lookups and clearing the cache each round they're all sub 5ms. Does remind me a bit of QUIC/HTTP3 failing and the fallback causing these kind of pauses.

[mikes]

Are you in Wales, we are on our LEA's smoothwall (Welsh broadband scheme) and we have problems with certain domains; speedtest is fine but Lenovo I'll get 50KB/sec max, another school in Wales had the same thing with Apple's domain.  I can run the Driver download at 50KB/sec, take the laptop home, and it'll shoot up to 10MB/sec on my home connection. 

 

And it won't serve certain domains, (no block) just no traffic, e.g. a loadbalancer on arcade.makecode.com  won't load. The URL will load fine on my home connection.  Haven't done any DNS testing other than using cloudflare or Google's domain forwarders for our domain DNS  (made no difference); I have basically no access to the LEA smoothwall  and it has been like this for 5+ years (since changeover) so it is what it is !   But general browsing for us is fine if one of these domains isn't being requested.

 

Also I've had slow internet complaints because the page didn't load up instantly; it took 1 or 2 seconds for the page to load. So there is always that. Wish I could put those users on 56k

 

[Gongalong]

We're not in Wales, and using VMB for internet.